The Most Underrated Star Wars Ship Just Got A Massive Upgrade
We’ve never seen ships in Star Wars do this before.
There are a lot of cool spaceships in the Star Wars galaxy. Next to really sweet-looking helmets and lightsabers, you could argue that amazing and memorable spaceship designs are what makes Star Wars what it is. In the sixth episode of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, the gang gets another glimpse at X-wing starfighters, a wonderful reminder of Colin Cantwell’s enduring and perfect design of those spacecraft, and many other unforgettable Star Wars vehicles. But Skeleton Crew’s latest innovation with Star Wars ships has nothing to do with the X-wing.
In Episode 6 of Skeleton Crew, the rusty old pirate ship, the Onyx Cinder gets a massive upgrade following its near-total decimation. And in becoming a new version of itself, the Onyx Cinder has demonstrated a new ability that we’ve never seen a Star Wars spaceship do ever before.
Spoilers ahead for Skeleton Crew Episode 6, “Zero Friends Again.”
After separating from Jod, following his apparent betrayal in Episode 5, Wim, Fern, Neel, and K-B find themselves stranded on Lanupa, unless, of course, they can get back to their commandeered pirate ship, the Onyx Cinder, which is the whole reason for their adventure in the first place. Like the Millennium Falcon before it, the Onyx Cinder is almost like a character in the series, as its discovery and hidden secrets are central to the story. So when the Onyx Cinder ends up on the scrap heap and is seemingly about to be incinerated by a massive garbage disposal system, there’s a hot second where it looks like this strange, new Star Wars hero-ship is about to bite the dust. But then, everybody remembers that the pirate droid, SM-33, told them all never to touch a specific button because if they did, it would activate something called “the emergency hull demolition sequencer.” Time to press the button and save the day!
This idea is something that's never quite featured in Star Wars before. The notion that a ship could shed part of its skin and become a smaller, sleeker version of itself is pretty much brand new and utterly unique to Skeleton Crew in general and the Onyx Cinder in specific.
The new, more compact form of the Onyx Cinder.
This trope is familiar to science fiction fans of course — from the Enterprise separating its saucer section in Star Trek: The Next Generation, to the emergency decoy separation of a large shuttle in Transformers: The Movie (1986), fictional spaceships ships detaching from themselves and becoming different isn’t something that Skeleton Crew invented here. Not to mention, spacecraft shedding parts of themselves is an essential part of how real-life space travel often works.
But within Star Wars, this is a brand-new type of upgrade. After Fern hits the button, several micro-explosions trigger what looks like a chain reaction, which, for a second, makes it seem like the Onyx Cinder is about to be destroyed. Instead, as the ship is being pulled into the trash incinerator, it manages to shimmy its way out, discarding its front end, and suddenly becoming sleeker and more compact than before. The show previously established that the cockpit of the Onyx Cinder was on the side of the ship, but now that the ship is half as big, that configuration has changed. If the Onyx Cinder looked clunky and lumbering before, now it’s slick and nimble.
With just two episodes left, Skeleton Crew has a lot of mysteries left to solve. But with an upgraded pirate ship front and center, the unlikely heroes of the series have suddenly been given a very cool, new hope.
